Menu

We Don’t Use Telegrams These Days

She remembered when they had named the road in honor of the family. It was the same day they gave her father one of those Century Farm plaques.

New name or not, not many people came up this road. Farm trucks, mostly. Lots of tractors.

She could see the official car coming a long way off. She knew what it meant, same as it had meant to her grandmother in 1945 when a black War Department car carrying a priest and a maimed Marine Corps captain brought the telegram up onto the porch and her son out of their lives forever.